Learn How Smoke Alarms Get Recycled.

Are you curious about how smoke alarms get recycled? You probably didn’t know this but there’s a very small amount of radioactive material in some of your smoke alarms. They’re completely safe under all normal conditions including a fire. However, because of the presence of this radioactive material, you need to recycle them!

How Do Smoke Alarms Get Recycled?

Customers drop off old smoke alarms to any of our Regional Recycling Bottle Depots.

Our team packages the alarms and sends them to a 3rd party for sorting and recycling.

After removing and storing these hazardous materials the harmless smoke alarms heads back into the recycling process.

A Large machine crushes the smoke alarms into tiny pieces.

While another machine separates them into metal & plastic materials.

Before being reused in the manufacturing process, plastic is turned into small pellets, while metal is smelted and poured into ingots.

Finally these extracted materials are used to make new products without having to dip into our limited resources.

Did you know many fatal fires often start at night? Maybe you think that the smell of smoke will wake you up, but that’s an incorrect assumption. In fact smoke from a fire usually puts people into a deeper sleep. Often, victims never wake up. Smoke alarms not only saves lives but protect us against injury and loss due to fire. Thus, haveing a working smoke alarm in your home reduces your chances of being harmed in a fire by 51%.

The Canada Safety Council reminds us to regularly test out our smoke alarms to make sure they’re working properly. A dead smoke alarm is worse that not having one at all because it gives you a false sense of security. As a result of your testing, you find it’s no longer working properly you can bring it to us for safe recycling.